The present invention relates to radio access network (RAN) sharing and more particularly to active RAN sharing.
The technology disclosed in this document, hereinafter called NetShare, aims to provide an effective RAN (radio access network) sharing technique for spectrum-sharing among several entities on cellular networks. We use the term entities to generally refer to mobile network operators (MNOs) that share the network, mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), content providers, enterprises etc. Specifically, we focus on the problem of managing wireless resources across multiple basestations among multiple entities sharing the network. NetShare allows different entities to reserve aggregate resources on the cellular network.
NetShare ensures that an entity receives this reserved fraction of the wireless resources across a set of basestations in the cellular network.
In recent years, there have been a few efforts on wireless resource virtualization [1, 2, 3] that enforce resource reservations on every basestation (BS) independently. However, we believe that provisioning aggregate resources to the different entities across multiple basestations is an essential requirement for effective RAN sharing for the following reasons:
(1) The user distribution, average user channel conditions and user-traffic requirements of an entity may vary significantly across basestations even at fine-time scales. Hence, enforcing per-basestation resource reservation may not meet the requirements of an entity from a network perspective.
(2) It may be harder for entities to estimate average resource requirements on a per-basestation level as it varies over time and area [4]. Defining the resource requirement either over a specific geographical area that is potentially covered by several basestations, or based on the architectural hierarchy—for example, all basestations controlled by a specific network gateway—would be a realistic alternative.
No known solution has considered the problem of sharing resources across multiple base stations for several entities as we do in this work. NVS [1], VBTS [2] and LTEvirt [3] attempt to share resource on each individual base station.    [1] R. Kokku, R. Mahindra, H. Zhang, and S. Rangarajan. NVS: A Substrate for Virtualizing WiMAX Networks. In ACM MobiCom., September 2010.    [2] G. Bhanage, R. Daya, I. Seskar, and D. Raychaudhuri. VNTS: A Virtual Network Traffic Shaper for Air Time Fairness in 802.16e. In ICC, 2010.    [3] L. Zhao, M. Li, Y. Zaki, Timm-Giel, and C. Gorg. LTE Virtualization: From theoretical gain to practical solution In ITC, 2011.    [4] U. Paul, A. P. Subramanian, M. Buddhikot, and S. R. Das. Understanding Traffic Dynamics in Cellular Data Networks. In IEEE Infocom, 2011.